Stay Free - Russel Brand - March 02, 2024


Here's the News: Tucker Just Dropped a Bombshell About a Whole Industry Behind Online Censorship


Episode Stats

Length

30 minutes

Words per Minute

193.96185

Word Count

5,932

Sentence Count

271

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

4


Summary

In this episode, Russell Brand takes a deep dive into the role of the tech companies and their relationship with the US government, and how they are using their power to exert control over the perception of reality through the use of fake news and propaganda. He also discusses the rise of a new political force operating on a global stage that you may have heard referred to before, but we ll now understand in great depth as this censorship industrial complex truly emerges, which means that the 2020 election and the 2019 pandemic were the most censored events in human history, that now the US foreign policy and defense industry have unprecedented power, and that with 2024 being the year of elections, it s likely that we will be experiencing more censorship than ever before. Join us on our convoluted, baffling, yet beautiful journey to truth and freedom together. To support our work, click the link in the description. You get additional content every week, me commentating on cultural matters, and you ll love them. Remember, there s an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together. Stay free! to elevate your consciousness together, and enjoy the episode. No, here s the Fucking News! - No, Here s the fucking news! by Awakening Wanderers. - Russell Brand We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content, and we re bringing you in depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Veena Shiva, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Maté, and many more. You ll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering, they re not telling you the truth, but are amplifying establishment messages and not telling the truth. We ll be delivering a podcast every day, 7 days 7 days a week. . - The Awakening Wanderer, by Russell Brand, bringing you a podcast delivering a deep and unfiltered thoughts and perspectives on current topics, by bringing you deeper and deeper understanding of current events. Stay Free with Russell Brand - Stay Free, Stay Free! , by . . by The New York Times bestselling author Gaborates on this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand. by Jordan Peterson , we bring you in- by Sam Harris and we ll bring you deep and unedited conversations with people who are going to help you elevate the consciousness of your consciousness.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download your podcasts.
00:00:05.000 We really appreciate you, our listeners, and want to bring you more content.
00:00:08.000 We will be delivering a podcast every day, seven days a week, every single day.
00:00:13.000 You'll get a detailed breakdown of current topics that the mainstream media should be covering, but if they are covering, they're amplifying establishment messages and not telling you the truth.
00:00:23.000 Once a week, we bring you in-depth conversations with guests like Jordan Peterson, RFK Jr., Sam Harris, Vandana Shiva, Gabor Maté, and many more.
00:00:31.000 Now enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:34.000 Remember, there's an episode every single day to educate and elevate our consciousness together.
00:00:40.000 Stay free and enjoy the episode.
00:00:42.000 No, here's the fucking news!
00:00:51.000 Hello there you Awakening Wanderers, thanks for joining us on our convoluted, baffling yet beautiful journey to truth and freedom together.
00:00:58.000 To support our work, click the link in the description.
00:01:00.000 You get additional content every week, me commentating on cultural matters.
00:01:03.000 We don't release those videos anywhere else, you'll love them.
00:01:06.000 You also get to join us for interviews with proper journalists and key political figures that are going to help lead this movement that will ultimately have to come from you to It's inevitable and eventual success and it cannot come quickly enough because we now know as a result of the fascinating interview between Mike Benz and Tucker Carlson that there's a new emergent political force operating on a global stage that you may have heard referred to before by authors like Martin
00:01:32.000 But we'll now understand in great depth as this censorship industrial complex truly emerges which means that the 2020 election and the 2019 pandemic were the most censored events in human history.
00:01:44.000 That now the US foreign policy and defense industry have unprecedented power and with 2024 being the year of elections it's likely that we will be experiencing more censorship than ever before.
00:01:56.000 Nick Mark Clegg, a former British politician and now head of Aspect of Meta, has 40,000 employees over there dedicated to censoring free speech in order to preserve what he bizarrely refers to as election integrity.
00:02:10.000 And the word integrity does not belong in this conversation.
00:02:14.000 We are in a war for freedom of information right now.
00:02:17.000 We are in a war to control the perception of reality.
00:02:20.000 Independent news sources such as this one, the ability to communicate immediately and with as little friction between us, the way that we currently can, is under threat.
00:02:29.000 Democracy itself is under threat.
00:02:31.000 International relationships are under threat.
00:02:33.000 The ability to challenge the legitimacy of wars and measures taken by our government, often under the guidance of global organisations, is under threat.
00:02:42.000 We have to wake up immediately. Several people have sent me this interview
00:02:46.000 saying it's hypocal and given that Tucker Carlson's done two very important interviews
00:02:50.000 recently, he did that one with Putin, then he had a little chat with another guy who gets
00:02:53.000 a little bit of heat from the mainstream media. Yes, old Russ himself, but this is the
00:02:58.000 one. This is the one to watch because Mike Bent explains how information and therefore
00:03:03.000 reality is controlled by some very powerful interests. We're going to look at some of it
00:03:07.000 together, then we're going to analyse it further, and then we're going to organise
00:03:10.000 against this machine together.
00:03:12.000 They explicitly said on tape that they were set up to do what the government was banned
00:03:17.000 from doing itself.
00:03:19.000 And then they articulated a multi-step framework in order to coerce all the tech companies to take censorship actions.
00:03:26.000 They said on tape the tech companies would not have done but for their pressure, which
00:03:30.000 involved using threats of government force because they were the deputised arm of the
00:03:34.000 government.
00:03:35.000 They had a formal partnership with the DHS.
00:03:37.000 They were able to use DHS's proprietary domestic disinformation switchboard to immediately talk
00:03:43.000 to top brass at all the tech companies for takedowns.
00:03:46.000 So what we thought of as big tech censorship was always government censorship.
00:03:50.000 Governments have proxy organizations within social media, and actually social media itself, operating to control the information that is accessible.
00:04:00.000 Generally speaking, this is just my personal opinion, it's information that would arm you with sufficient facts to become a dissident, for you to become suspicious and cynical of your own government's actions.
00:04:10.000 In short, The apparatus that was designed, and this is explicit and becomes more explicit over the course of this conversation we're having now, that was designed to control what was referred to as terrorism, foreign terror threats, has now been turned inward onto domestic populations.
00:04:23.000 This happens in my country, the United Kingdom, where you have the 77th Brigade, which has peculiar ties to Caroline Dynage, who was specifically the politician who demanded that I be demonetised.
00:04:34.000 And when I say peculiar connections, it's her husband, Rannit.
00:04:36.000 Psy-ops that were utilized to control foreign dissidents when it was convenient and necessary are now being used to control domestic populations.
00:04:44.000 And for a moment, pause just here on the semantics of this situation.
00:04:48.000 They were regarded, weren't they, groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, they say quite rightly, as terrorists.
00:04:53.000 But we regarded the key feature of terrorism to be sort of violence, and maybe because of the way that we were generally coached, perhaps some of the religious and cultural paraphernalia We belong to the idea of the terrorist.
00:05:04.000 But now we know that what terrorism truly means is a desire and potentially the ability to disrupt the agenda of the powerful.
00:05:13.000 Because guess who's a terrorist now?
00:05:16.000 You and me.
00:05:17.000 And anyone that's interested in opposing their narrative.
00:05:20.000 Even if that means simply having a conversation on reasonable matters like personal medical pursuits.
00:05:27.000 Or having a perspective that might be contrary to the popular or mainstream view regarding a war.
00:05:32.000 You are terrorists now.
00:05:34.000 And they bragged on tape about how they got the tech companies to all systematically adopt a new terms of service speech violation ban called delegitimization.
00:05:43.000 which meant any tweet, any YouTube video, any Facebook post, any TikTok video, any Discord post,
00:05:50.000 any Twitch video, anything on the internet that undermine public faith and confidence
00:05:57.000 in the use of mail-in ballots or early voting drop boxes or ballot tabulation issues on election day
00:06:04.000 was a prima facie terms of service violation policy under this new delegitimization policy.
00:06:11.000 People are in prison as a result of that, by the way, now.
00:06:11.000 Excellent.
00:06:14.000 And remember that France has just introduced laws to prevent you criticising Pfizer.
00:06:18.000 This is happening right now.
00:06:19.000 And look, to Ireland too, the new hate speech laws that are peculiarly diffuse and oddly draconian.
00:06:23.000 And our country, the online safety bill, championed by someone who has connections to psy-ops that were previously deployed against terrorism.
00:06:31.000 I don't want to sound like a hysterical, I'm not a branting conspiracy theorist, I'm simply pointing out that global organisations with global reach have a singular policy that they are deploying against vast populations.
00:06:44.000 And someone like Mike Benz here on Tucker's platform, gracefully delivered by Elon Musk, points out where the legislation emerged from and what the chronology of these events was.
00:06:52.000 That they only adopted because of pass-through government pressure from the Election Integrity Partnership, which they bragged about on tape, including the grid that they used to do this, and simultaneously invoking threats of government breaking them up, or government stopping doing favors for the tech companies unless they did this.
00:07:09.000 That's brilliant, because do you remember all the demonopolisation conversations?
00:07:12.000 I remember being broadly supportive of that.
00:07:14.000 Yeah, you should break up Facebook.
00:07:15.000 You should break up Big Tech.
00:07:16.000 You should have that communally run, democratically by the people.
00:07:19.000 No, no, no, not the last bit, but we should break them up.
00:07:22.000 All that was was a threat to get Big Tech platforms to be obedient and start acting as proxies for the government.
00:07:28.000 Now, these are things that we're all experiencing.
00:07:30.000 If you've had a single post disappear, let alone if you've been subject to massive psyops yourself, this is this policy in action.
00:07:38.000 As well as inducing crisis PR by working with their media allies.
00:07:41.000 And they said the government, DHS, could not do that themselves.
00:07:44.000 And so they set up this basically constellation of State Department, Pentagon, and IC networks to run this pre-censorship campaign, which by their own math had 22 million tweets on Twitter alone.
00:07:59.000 And mind you, they did this on 15 platforms.
00:08:01.000 This is hundreds of millions of posts.
00:08:03.000 Which were all scanned and banned or throttled so that they could not be amplified or they existed in a sort of limited state purgatory or had these frictions affixed to them in the form of fact-checking labels where you couldn't actually click through the thing or you had to, it was an inconvenience to be able to share it.
00:08:18.000 I've always been cynical about online activism, but now simply by sharing posts like this, you are becoming a dissident.
00:08:25.000 You can contradict the intentions of the state powers that Mike Benz is describing.
00:08:30.000 Now they did this seven months before the election.
00:08:32.000 This took out- Wait, wait, may I ask you to pause right there?
00:08:35.000 So what you're saying is, what you're suggesting is, they knew the outcome of the election seven months before it was held.
00:08:43.000 It looks very bad.
00:08:45.000 What an extraordinary suggestion.
00:08:46.000 But even something as apocal as election rigging, which in a way is just a technological evolution of ideas like gerrymandering and manipulation and uniparty policies and comparable politics within both of the major parties in most democratic nations, it's shocking, astonishing to a degree, but also, God, if you're living in this space, hardly surprising.
00:09:08.000 Let's look in more detail now about this age of censorship that we've entered into.
00:09:13.000 And how censorship's not just like what it used to mean in the old days, a sticker across explicit images in a potentially erotic magazine.
00:09:20.000 No, what it means now is the control of reality itself, the control of elections, the control of global policies around health, the control of your mind, your reality, the control of everyone you love, everyone you care for, being filtered for and dominated by systems that you didn't vote for.
00:09:37.000 And if you do vote for them, that vote may not count, it seems.
00:09:40.000 Let's get into it.
00:09:41.000 Mike Benz, the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, explained to Tucker how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions under the pretext of countering misinformation rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online.
00:10:01.000 The 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the two most censored events in human history.
00:10:07.000 And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship industrial complex.
00:10:13.000 In a sense, this is the pinnacle of stories we've been covering for a good while now.
00:10:17.000 The censorship industrial complex is a term that we learned from Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi.
00:10:22.000 Recently, because of Lee Fang's reporting, we were able to understand that Moderna had been spying on our channel.
00:10:28.000 We know that the government spent money ensuring that our content got curtailed and shut down, that stories were being planted in the media.
00:10:35.000 It's astonishing what's taking place here, and it's astonishing that it's continuing.
00:10:39.000 Think for a moment that Julian Assange is having those hearings.
00:10:41.000 Think for a moment about the revelations of Edward Snowden some time ago, that had comparable revelations, but now looks like some old-timey hacking, like where the Five Eyes nations all exchanged information on one another's populations in order to get round pesky freedom of information and privacy laws in those domestic territories themselves.
00:10:59.000 Now what's happening is this is metastasized into a vast unstoppable cyborg of censorship and control.
00:11:06.000 The problem here is profound, with deep historical roots that go back to the aftermath of World War II and the creation of the CIA, along with a host of US-funded international institutions.
00:11:15.000 But for our purposes it suffices to understand the problem in its two most recent stages, the period from 1991 to 2014 and from 2014 to the present.
00:11:23.000 What's being referred to are the establishment of the legacy news media and its implicit connections to the state from their inception, Operation Mockingbird and various other ways that the CIA and deep state organisations have always infiltrated media.
00:11:38.000 And the problem occurred when legacy media's power base became diminished with the rise of social media and the internet.
00:11:45.000 At the outset of internet privatisation in 1991, free speech online was seen as an instrument of statecraft.
00:11:51.000 At that time, says Benz, internet free speech was championed by the US foreign policy and defence establishments as a way to support dissident groups around the world in their efforts to overthrow authoritarian or disfavoured regimes.
00:12:03.000 That's why freedom of speech used to be a neoliberal That's why, as you might say, as people say, the left used to care about free speech.
00:12:10.000 At that point, free speech could be used to destabilize foreign governments.
00:12:15.000 Hey, these dissident groups, they should have free speech because that free speech means that we'll be able to corrupt their democratic processes and install a puppet government.
00:12:22.000 Now free speech means that you might start challenging your establishment, the United States government, the UK government, the Australian, Canadian government.
00:12:30.000 Now you are the dissident and free speech is not so popular.
00:12:34.000 That's how and why that change took place.
00:12:36.000 I've always been curious about it.
00:12:38.000 Didn't the left used to talk about free speech?
00:12:39.000 Didn't I grow up thinking free speech because of women's rights, because of civil rights, because of rights of gay folk, because it's important that we can all speak to one another?
00:12:46.000 No, no, no, no, no.
00:12:47.000 It was a convenient tool to support it then and it's convenient to shut it down now.
00:12:52.000 Astonishing.
00:12:52.000 It allowed the U.S.
00:12:53.000 to conduct what Benz calls insta-regime change operations in service of the State Department's foreign policy agenda.
00:13:01.000 The plan worked really well.
00:13:03.000 Among other things, free speech on the internet allowed U.S.-backed groups to assert control over state-run media in foreign countries, making it much easier to overthrow government.
00:13:12.000 Every time you hear someone say, in Tehran, they're the sexist over there, don't care about women's rights, Now we can learn to tune in to what's actually happening.
00:13:19.000 Hold on a minute, we know they don't care about women's rights.
00:13:21.000 They're obviously trying to institute a regime change in that country.
00:13:24.000 So just watch out for it now because the legacy media will do it again and again because that's what they do.
00:13:28.000 The high watermark of this way of deploying free speech online, Benz explains, was the Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012 when governments the Obama administration considered problematic.
00:13:38.000 Egypt, Tunisia, Libya all began falling in the so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions.
00:13:43.000 During that time, the State Department worked closely with these social media companies to keep them up and running in those countries to be used as tools for protesters and dissident groups that were trying to circumvent state censorship.
00:13:54.000 So if your agenda is in alignment with their agenda, they will support you.
00:13:58.000 If it isn't, they won't.
00:13:59.000 Say, a figure like Zelensky, who just becomes a hero overnight and he's turning up the Golden Globes and billions of dollars are going his way.
00:14:05.000 Do you really think that that's because they care about Ukrainian people?
00:14:10.000 Or do you think, just temporarily, Zelensky becomes, oh look, use this guy quick, baggage him up like a mule with funding just strapped on him like dynamite and sent in to explode conveniently for their narrative.
00:14:22.000 And if Zelensky at some point becomes inconvenient, just ask Colonel Gaddafi what happens when you're no longer useful to the establishment.
00:14:28.000 Oh, you can't cause, you know, dead now because they facilitate his death.
00:14:32.000 We came, we saw, he died.
00:14:36.000 So this is a significant moment when you look at the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the ongoing vilification of Vladimir Putin, who I acknowledge is a tyrannical figure, war criminal, all of that.
00:14:43.000 It's a serious thing.
00:14:44.000 But look at it through the lens of utility and exploitation.
00:14:48.000 And again, the 2014 coup, which we talk about all the time, comes up.
00:14:51.000 This is fascinating.
00:14:52.000 All that changed in 2014 after the US-backed coup in Ukraine toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych, and there was an unexpected pro-Russia counter-coup in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine.
00:15:04.000 That's literally the advent of the war we're involved in now.
00:15:07.000 It was that same year, says Benz, when the people of Crimea voted to be annexed into the Russian Federation.
00:15:12.000 That was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO.
00:15:17.000 For a moment we can question what NATO does and what NATO's for.
00:15:21.000 Do you think NATO is for you?
00:15:24.000 We care about free speech!
00:15:25.000 Free speech, everyone!
00:15:26.000 And now, let's hear from the people of Crimea using their free speech!
00:15:30.000 We would like to belong to Russia!
00:15:32.000 Yeah, I don't like this free speech!
00:15:33.000 That's bad!
00:15:34.000 Free speech, that's a hate crime!
00:15:36.000 Was that?
00:15:36.000 I heard some hate crime right there, did you?
00:15:38.000 It sounded like hate to me, boss!
00:15:39.000 Let's get Victoria Nuland!
00:15:41.000 Let's get all of our state marionettes in to say that hate speech is on the rise!
00:15:45.000 Oh my god, all of this hate speech!
00:15:47.000 Thereafter, NATO, the CIA and the State Department, together with the intelligence agencies of our European allies, did an about-face on internet free speech.
00:15:54.000 Oh, you don't like free speech all of a sudden?
00:15:56.000 They began instead to engage in what amounted to hybrid or information warfare to censor what they saw as Russian propaganda online.
00:16:03.000 These efforts quickly spread beyond Ukraine and Eastern Europe to include the censorship of populist groups on the right that were emerging across the EU as a response to the Syrian migrant crisis.
00:16:13.000 We all saw this take place as well.
00:16:15.000 We remember the vilification of far-right groups.
00:16:17.000 Now whatever your politics are, you're actually, in a democracy, entitled to them.
00:16:20.000 Personally, I would suggest hating individuals or groups of people on the basis of their culture.
00:16:24.000 It's not acceptable, but I can understand people having national identities because for a long time we were told that we were meant to be protecting our nations and going to war to protect our nations and sacrificing our lives to protect our nation.
00:16:34.000 By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016 explains Benz, NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot.
00:16:39.000 These are the same bloody countries that are being bombed by the exact same interests that are telling you that you're
00:16:43.000 racist for having concerns about your country.
00:16:45.000 So, wow, a lot to learn.
00:16:47.000 By the time Brexit emerged in the summer of 2016, explains Benz,
00:16:51.000 NATO and the foreign policy establishment felt there was a real crisis afoot.
00:16:54.000 The problem was spreading west from Central and Eastern Europe and it had to be stopped.
00:16:58.000 If it wasn't, then Brexit might trigger the collapse of the entire EU, along with NATO,
00:17:03.000 and the entire constellation of supranational institutions that relied on NATO.
00:17:08.000 Looking back at it, as an inhabitant of this nation, what do you think their real connection to the EU and NATO and all that stuff is?
00:17:15.000 Anyway, we love the EU!
00:17:17.000 It's obvious in retrospect that what they don't want is the disruption of their ability through these agencies to evade democracy and the process of democracy.
00:17:25.000 Referendums and referenda like Brexit or the mad giddy election of Donald Trump is obviously an anomaly and a disruption to a global trajectory wherever you stand on either of those issues and whatever you think they're about because I notice that they're generally rendered as being about hate but since then I've learned that hate is one of the One of the ways, and hate speech and racism and the persecution of minorities, which I'm pretty convinced the global establishment don't actually care about, is one of the ways that they legitimise censorship and control.
00:17:55.000 And through that lens, I look at Brexit a little differently.
00:17:57.000 The entire post-war architecture of institutions might come crashing down all because the hearts and minds of the people were being swayed.
00:18:04.000 We're told that that architecture is to maintain peace, but even that's something that I might want to interrogate a little.
00:18:10.000 So went the thinking anyway.
00:18:11.000 As far as the National Security Establishment was concerned, citizens were being swayed by Russian and far-right propaganda and we can't have that.
00:18:18.000 Under these circumstances, free speech was the last thing that could be allowed to flourish online.
00:18:22.000 Censorship became the order of the day.
00:18:24.000 As Carlton put it, These NATO and EU leaders identified their new enemy as democracy within their own countries, their own voters in other words.
00:18:31.000 They feared that their people, the citizens of their own countries would get their way and they went to war against that.
00:18:37.000 And doesn't it make sense really that you, if you become awakened, enlightened, and in tune,
00:18:42.000 and demand real power in your own life, and that means the ability to disrupt the interests
00:18:47.000 of the institutions and groups that are currently powerful, because at the moment there is a wealth transfer,
00:18:51.000 it seems that more and more we're living within a fuel and energy crisis,
00:18:56.000 inflation, explosion of grocery prices.
00:18:58.000 If you wanted to influence that, or interact even with that,
00:19:01.000 you would be impacting their current strategy and their current structures.
00:19:05.000 And so therefore you are the problem.
00:19:07.000 And then Trump was elected.
00:19:09.000 From that moment, and indeed as we know from the Russia collusion hoax,
00:19:12.000 even before Trump was elected in November 2016, the US foreign policy and defense establishment,
00:19:18.000 which had done so much to center and weaponize the internet overseas,
00:19:21.000 turned their attention to American citizens.
00:19:24.000 This is a theme you hear again and again.
00:19:26.000 Infrastructure that was deployed overseas to create regime change, to control dissidents, to arm, to inspire, to utilize dissidents, has been deployed in domestic populations.
00:19:34.000 You've experienced it.
00:19:35.000 I've experienced it.
00:19:36.000 We've all experienced it.
00:19:37.000 Sometimes I think it's as simple as they've got the technology and they sort of can't help but use it.
00:19:41.000 But other times I think it's about absolute and total control.
00:19:44.000 Initially, their predicate for domestic surveillance was Crossfire Hurricane, the fatuous notion that Russia had infiltrated the Trump campaign and that Trump was a Russian asset.
00:19:52.000 That's still going on.
00:19:53.000 Nancy Pelosi is still making claims along those lines.
00:19:56.000 Literally, like right now probably somewhere.
00:19:59.000 Once that collapsed, they needed another excuse to spy on and censor Americans who held disfavored opinions or who spread misinformation, to put it in the parlance of the censorship industrial complex.
00:20:07.000 To do that, they had to get around the prohibition against the CIA operating on American soil.
00:20:13.000 Since they couldn't very well get away with openly spying on and censoring American citizens, they decided to house the bulk of their censorship operations inside the Department of Homeland Security, specifically in a part of DHS tasked with reducing and eliminating threats to US citizens.
00:20:26.000 US critical physical and cyber infrastructure. Hence, domestic misinformation, which is really
00:20:32.000 just a term for opinions and information that the national security state doesn't like
00:20:36.000 or that run counter to State Department policy, was classified as an attack on critical cognitive
00:20:42.000 infrastructure and could therefore be censored. What it amounted to was an end run around
00:20:47.000 the First Amendment.
00:20:48.000 We're told that the internet creates these silos, these bubbles of opinion, these worlds
00:20:52.000 of escalating extremism. But on a personal and interpersonal level, did you not notice
00:20:57.000 that in your own family, you used to have people that had different political views
00:21:00.000 and at Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever, you'd just go, oh, he's a bit Republican or
00:21:03.000 they're a bit of a hippie or a lefty.
00:21:05.000 Then you got on with your life rather than it being a frontier for a new war.
00:21:09.000 Where is this new atmosphere actually coming from?
00:21:11.000 Well, we've just had it explained to us.
00:21:13.000 It's to legitimise regarding ordinary citizens as terrorism and differences of opinion as an existential threat.
00:21:20.000 But even DHS couldn't do this directly, so it outsourced online censorship operations to third parties like the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP, which consisted of four separate organisations.
00:21:31.000 The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and a firm called Grafica.
00:21:39.000 These private sector partners did the nitty-gritty work of mapping out entire online networks of people who helped spread certain disfavored opinions, or what the censors called false narratives.
00:21:50.000 Essentially, they were deputized to censor Americans on behalf of the government.
00:21:53.000 Do you remember when you first saw like maybe a graph about the dark Joel Rogan is a gateway to being a racist.
00:22:00.000 He's a right-wing portal gateway.
00:22:02.000 That was the result of these organizations, many of which are government-funded or privately funded by vested interests.
00:22:08.000 Only that Atlantic Council needs a bloody good looking at.
00:22:10.000 And what they did is just created the idea that you can't trust powerful online sources whose opinions run counter to establishment narratives.
00:22:18.000 Once they've determined that that was the desired outcome, they set about finding ways.
00:22:22.000 Well, you shouldn't listen to this person because they're a racist.
00:22:24.000 You shouldn't listen to this person because they're a sex offender.
00:22:26.000 You shouldn't listen to this, but they just filled in the blanks.
00:22:28.000 These managers and their partners inside the US government went about their task with gusto, including a seven-month pre-censorship campaign ahead of the 2020 election.
00:22:37.000 Any content challenging public faith in mail-in ballots, early voting and ballot drop boxes was flagged for violating new rules about delegitimizing elections.
00:22:45.000 The censors, along with their governments, had strong-armed the social media companies into adopting these rules as documented In great detail last year with the release of the Twitter files, you'll remember when Schellenberg has come on our show, you can watch these interviews, they're up now, he talked about pre-bunking.
00:22:59.000 How journalists are often invited to conferences and told, hey, there's going to be all this disinformation about Hunter Biden's laptop, so when that does come out, will you go ahead and pre-bunk that for us?
00:23:07.000 We know that now.
00:23:08.000 Indeed, the Twitter files exposed a massive effort by the federal government to deputize Twitter and other social media companies to do what it could not, at least not legally.
00:23:16.000 But in some ways, the Twitter files just revealed the tip of the censorship iceberg.
00:23:20.000 One of the problems I have with the liberal left, even though I really admire some brilliant online broadcasters and comics, for example, is their unwillingness to address that figures like Trump or Elon Musk, who might be out of alignment with some of their cultural views, are serving this vital function by disrupting exactly this narrative.
00:23:35.000 Elon Musk's The acquisition of X is a problem for them because they lost a compliant partner in a space that they needed to control.
00:23:43.000 And subsequently Elon Musk is dealing with a lot of stuff and a lot of flack and all of that.
00:23:47.000 And you can have your own views about what his overall function is.
00:23:50.000 But when it comes to this particular problem, and I believe that this is THE problem, the control of information and therefore the control of reality, Elon Musk is disrupting that trend and tendency, as did Brexit, as did Trump.
00:24:02.000 Wherever you stand on the cultural purview around each of those issues.
00:24:05.000 And I would also start to be open to the possibility that I personally may have misunderstood the cultural purview because where did I get it from?
00:24:13.000 Who gave me that context?
00:24:15.000 The State Department, through grants and product development assistance to private entities like the Global Disinformation Index, GDI, and NewsGuard, was actively intervening in the news media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure development and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.
00:24:37.000 One of the moments in that interview that I enjoyed was when he said, what are you going to do when the New
00:24:41.000 York Times is reduced to the power and capacity of an average or at least somewhat large Facebook page?
00:24:47.000 This is what's taken place in the last few years.
00:24:49.000 The legacy media's control of the minds of the population has been significantly challenged, reduced, castrated,
00:24:54.000 annihilated, perhaps even, and what we are experiencing now is an attempt to reassert
00:24:58.000 centralized power.
00:25:00.000 The State Department then gave these tools to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn to target disfavored media
00:25:05.000 outlets.
00:25:06.000 Through these and other methods during the 2020 election cycle and the COVID pandemic,
00:25:11.000 the government-backed censorship industrial complex throttled millions of online posts,
00:25:15.000 suppressing news traffic to news sites and undermined revenue streams for a host of outlets and influencers with
00:25:20.000 disfavored or dissident views.
00:25:22.000 Both the GDI and State Department's Global Engagement Center, GEC, developed censorship tools that included supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning artificial intelligence technology.
00:25:36.000 All these tools are being deployed now to control information.
00:25:39.000 But this isn't a thing of the past.
00:25:40.000 All the censorship infrastructure described above is still intact, still functioning, and is firing on all cylinders right now ahead of the 2024 election.
00:25:50.000 Is there one politician that is right now saying, I will dismantle this?
00:25:53.000 Bobby Kennedy is.
00:25:53.000 He's saying on day one, I'll dismantle this.
00:25:55.000 Is Trump saying it?
00:25:56.000 I don't know.
00:25:57.000 You let me know in the comments and chat.
00:25:58.000 This is a global problem that should be addressed.
00:26:00.000 If anything, the censorship industrial complex is more robust than it was four years ago.
00:26:04.000 Just last week, META's President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, boasted on CNBC that he currently has some 40,000 employees, which is nearly 60% of META's entire workforce tasked with censoring speech on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
00:26:18.000 Clegg also claimed META has spent about $20 billion, including $5 billion in the last year, on censorship efforts, or what What he euphemistically called election integrity.
00:26:27.000 Sometimes you wonder where power is now situated and a paragraph like that tells you where power has gone.
00:26:33.000 If politicians seem replaceable and interchangeable, if democracy seems intransigent, turgid and static, where is power?
00:26:41.000 Well, it's there when you've got billions being spent on controlling information that directs the outcome of elections and even beyond that, global policies.
00:26:49.000 What does that mean in practice?
00:26:50.000 We don't have to guess.
00:26:51.000 Remember that Facebook infamously censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020 at the behest of the FBI.
00:26:56.000 With 40,000 employees now charged with censoring hate speech and ensuring election integrity, we can be fairly certain that if another Hunter Biden laptop story comes along this election cycle, it too will be quashed by the censors.
00:27:08.000 Difficult to dispute.
00:27:09.000 Why exactly is our government doing this?
00:27:12.000 It's not merely a partisan preference for ensuring Democrats stay in power, but something deeper and more insidious.
00:27:17.000 To circle back to Carlson's interview with Benz, it's because the national security state has come to regard democracy not as the will of the people expressed through elections, but as the constellation of government agencies, government-backed institutions, corporations, media outlets and non-profit groups.
00:27:31.000 Protecting democracy in this view means protecting these institutions from the people they were putatively meant to serve.
00:27:37.000 It's almost like over a broader time frame, there's been a return to something like an aristocracy or even a monarchy or oligarchy.
00:27:44.000 There was a sort of a brief blip where you had, oh, this is representative democracy.
00:27:48.000 Here are these separate states and cities that might all interdependently be run by elected councils and officials and true democracy could be achieved.
00:27:56.000 That idea has been crushed by a broader trend towards, let's centralise power, let's tell people they've got democracy, but what we've got is total control.
00:28:04.000 What's been described there is total control.
00:28:06.000 As Benz at one point says in the interview, the relationship between the managers of the American empire and the citizens of the American homeland has broken down.
00:28:13.000 And that's played itself out in the story of the censorship industry.
00:28:17.000 I think what we have there between that interview and this article is a good understanding, as we are likely to achieve, of what's happening in the world right now.
00:28:26.000 The potential for information, for dissent, for diverse opinions, for conversation, for discourse, discussion, contradiction, democracy, power, as local as the individual, as diverse as the planet, has exploded into a set of systems that were simply not ready for it.
00:28:40.000 And we're now witnessing those systems try to regain control, introducing new laws to regain control, exerting new influence over the companies that have access to all of us, i.e.
00:28:50.000 the big tech and social media platforms that we all now use as part of everyday life.
00:28:54.000 Nothing less than a war for the control of our minds and our reality is taking place and all of us are somehow confined to very narrow bandwidths of conversation.
00:29:04.000 Little issues here or there, local or topical, or what about this and should that have happened and what about this?
00:29:09.000 When in fact what we all need to collectively do is take a broader perspective together And so the people I disagree with on the local and individual level have so much more in common with me than these vast institutions that are attempting to assert and exert mass control.
00:29:24.000 And unless we find ways together of forming a collective manifesto of demanding a decentralized but unified opposition to the problem of globalism and the global censorship required to achieve it, as outlined in these two pieces, then we're going to be in real serious trouble.
00:29:38.000 So get ready to make some new alliances right now.
00:29:41.000 Now get ready to, as they used to say, hold your nose and form friendships and alliances with cultural groups, ideas even that you might not agree with, because the alternative is plainly in sight now.
00:29:52.000 It's a centralized technocracy where a cadre of experts, powerful institutions, have near total control, executed through technology in forms of social credit scores, digital currencies, Absolute control of media that is absolutely unprecedented.
00:30:06.000 And while we're all distracted by, oh no, are these people like new Nazis or populists or is that hate speech?
00:30:11.000 They are quietly but very deftly like a sliding saber slicing right through the heart of everything that we're supposed to hold dear.
00:30:20.000 Freedom of speech, representative systems of government.
00:30:23.000 We're going to lose all of it unless we wake up now.
00:30:25.000 Well, that's just what I think.
00:30:26.000 Remember, we make this content all the time.
00:30:28.000 You can support our movement by joining us, clicking the link on the description below and getting involved in the content we make every single day together.